The Job
by JoeAverageSF
Summary: Being the cruel and tragical tale of a young man who wants Freddy Kreuger's job. This tale, laced with immorality and the unbearable darkness of the soul, is not suitable for readers of a sensitive nature. It is, however, quite good.


One-two...

Inside the deepest, meanest part of my soul I have this dream.

In the dream I am naked and alone. I am walking, barefoot and scared, along a cliff-face. The ground is dark red, almost black, and it cuts my foot with every step. The heat is intense and my skin burns every time I move. I am travelling to some specific point along the edge of the cliff, a place where the rock curls around me like talons.

I get there and look down. The drop is enormous, and at the bottom is endless vistas of darkness. Something enormous is down there, waiting for me. I cannot see it and I am thankful, for if I did I would never wake up.

I never leap. I always wake up and forget.

Nightmares are not a regular occurance for me. I always liked being asleep. Unlike most of my life, it was relatively stress-free.

In that regard, I really should have got a different job.

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There is a popular conception of University of California that characterizes it as a hippy commune, a place that never forgot the sixties and worked feverishly to organize protests, take back the night, clean up the whole Iraq thing, and plaster posters of DubyaHitler all over the town. I would easily argue that misconception.

Oh, sure, that element was there. Every stop sign in the town had added commentary underneath it (Stop War! Stop Driving! Stop Hating!) and some of the older residents are pretty insufferable to be around, but the vast majority of the students have all the openness and community spirit of a snake pit.

Think about it: the school is one of the hardest universities in America to gain admission. The average accepted undergraduate spent his entire high school experience getting A's, volunteering and building up "leadership/community service" experience to pad his application, and generally not having much fun in their teens. The rolls of incoming freshmen contain honor roll students, valedictorians of podunk high schools, the children of PRC diplomants, and other such illuminaries of the young community. Of course some do irrational things while at Berkeley, like get dredlocks or major in philosophy, but everyone else is there to GET SOMEWHERE.

Being responsible for the kind of student loan debts that could choke a monkey, I began my feverish search for a job within a year before I actually graduated. Here, you have to to. Behind the hallowed halls of Berkeley lurked an army of vicious predators, panthers with diplomas and a crush-the-jewelled-thrones-of-the-earth-beneath-my-sandalled-feet mentality. Resumes were sent out, professors were hassled for recommendation letters, internships were sought with grim determination. It was a race, a battle, and you were always behind, always under the axe.

I majored in biochemical engineering at the "suggestion" of my family (who also believed crushing debt in one's twenties strengthened character) was having a tremendously difficult time scoring any entry-level positions in the burgeoning biotech industry. Having intership credits, an honors diploma, just made me dime-a-dozen in Northern California.

Plus, and this is hard to admit, I give lousy interview. I'm Indian, and the first thing people see when they look at me is "tech support." I got my suit from Men's Wearhouse, and I don't know how to sell myself. The guy at the job center said in practice interviews that I present myself as a deer-in-the-headlights, golly-gee kinda guy that didn't inspire a lot of confidence in potential employers. That really pisses me off sometimes. I have the credentials. I did well in school. What more do they want?

If you, gentle reader, cannot surmise by now, I am not a very happy young man.

Is it any wonder I wanted a job that would let me kill peope?

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A couple of months before I graduated, I skipped past vague, ill-defined existentialist dread into full on, bowel-freezing panic. My friends (well, industry networking contacts) stopped being supportive and started deliberately avoiding me, like bad luck was contagious. The job search sucked. No one called me back, I got a bunch of form letters with their maddeningly vague rejections, and, as my magic 8-ball glibly informed me, prospects looked dim.

So, the on-line career finders.

Human resources recruiter? Nope. Not personable or pretty enough.

University Admissions Assistant? Nope. Do you really want me to look kids in the eye and tell them that 50 grand will DEFINITELY open doors for them?

Sysadmin? Nope. I'm game around a keyboard, but the IT kids have that field on lockdown.

Retail? Forget it. That's third world.

Dream Master-Entry Level? What the hell is that?

I read on.

Mess with people. Hurt them. Get payback.

Is this a joke? It can't be. It's on They have to verify these things before they post them.

The listing had no other contact information except for an e-mail address: Include resume and cover letter.

I pulled up my resume, attach it to my e-mail. I dug up my cover letter (non-specific.) I got the template from the career builder website. It's very polite an neutered. To whom this may concern, my name is Vijay Chakraborty. I've got a long list of things for you to be impressed with, shown thusly. Gimme a job.

I erased it.

This is what I write: I did everything they wanted me to do. I was a great student, I never took a wrong step, and they promised me that it would all work out in the end and that I'd be better off if I gave up today for tomorrow. They lied to me. So fuck them. Fuck you. Fuck it.

I stopped typing. What I wrote horrifed me. I get the strangest desire to erase it, smash my computer, and scream. My traitor's hands cut, paste, send.

Oh shit.

Almost immediately, the phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Vijay Chakraborty?" The voice on the other end is deep and unpleasant.

"Yeh...yes?"

"Did you think that was fucking funny, you little freak?"

It's the Dream-thing. I am terribly afraid. The submissive in me comes out. "I'm so sorry! I don't know why I did that! Please let me..."

"You only get one chance." The voice changes. Do I hear a Hindi accent? Do I hear my father? "You blew it."

Tidal waves of anger crash through me. "Go fuck yourself, you miserable old bastard." I say in Hindi.

Silence. I find myself again. Then a deep, hideous chuckling fills my ears. It bleeds out of the telephone, paints the room.

"Check your e-mail, boy." The voice had lost the accent, became a hanged-man's growl. The line went dead. I stood in my empty apartment, listening to the dialtone. I click my phone off. I am afraid.

Three-four...

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I didn't check my e-mail right away. This is what I did instead.

I went out, spent a bit too much money to eat a big dinner at the Asian Grotto on Durant Street. I had pho and bi bim bob, washed it down with a pearl drink, had some chicken tikka, walked around the block, tried to put in a donut, finished with some dumplings.

Lolling around the neighborhood in a daze, I ran into an old dorm room hook-up and we went back to her place, where she forced me to listen and critique parts of her dissertation. Critque turns to confession, turns to admission of loneliness. We had sex until we run out of condoms. We silently dressed, secretly agreed never to see each other again.

It was getting late. I went to Eudamonia and played Counter-strike on their LAN network until they closed. Then I walked around the city. I counted the bums in People's Park. I bought some pizza and ate it slow, bringing my fingers close to my mouth so I could smell her.

I wandered up to the frat row. Parties were going on and I joined them. The beer was warm, the company was shit, and the music was horrible, but I had a great time. When you're really drunk, you just don't care. You just hear the backbeat and you go with that.

Something was giving in me that night. I moved, stomping my feet, curling my teeth, howling at something in me. People were giving me looks, but I didn't care. I was out. I was free.

So, drunk and mean and feeling like the last angry god, I checked my e-mail.

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Why was the interview in East Oakland at ten o'clock at night?

When you're a nice kid from the suburbs, the ghetto is very scary. There are some places in the world that you drive through with your head down and the windows up. You strive not to make eye-contact with the suspicious clumps of young men and panic settles in your bowels as you remember the litany of news reports. Guns. Bloody death. Gangs. Murder.

It took me awhile, mostly because I was cruising a little too fast. Six pases and a bunch of queer looks from the locals, and I found the address.

This can't be right. It's just a house. An old, boarded up, white painted house. It didn't fit the surround area of tenemant housing and cheap apartments, but whatever fire burned the place out from the inside made it look dark and dead. It was probably now a homeless squat or something.

I turned away, double-checked the address I printed out. Yep. 1428. This is the place.

Behind me, the door creeked open.

The sound echoed down the silent street. My breath stopped.

Don't ask me why, but I went in. I had to. You know when you're dreaming about cliff faces and you don't want to go on, but your mind won't let you stop? There ya go.

The house was dark. The only light coming in was slipping greasily through the boarded up windows. I let my eyes adjust a moment before I said "Hello?"

"Siddown!!"

The voice, crusty with phlem and booze, made my heart leap into my throat. In the darkness I could make out the outline of a man on the floor. Then another. Then another.

The polite Indian boy kicked in. "I'm sorry. I have the wrong place. I'll go."

"Y'here fer the job?"

Get right the fuck out of here. "Yes?"

"Then siddown!!"

I moved around the edges of the room, bumped several times into people, and found the least broken bottle and crack vial infested spot on the ground, and sat down. In the darkness, I felt dozens of eyes on me.

"College boy..." one man, his voice deep and black, said. There was nothing friendly about his tone, It was more of an accusation than a question.

Out of my depth here. Let's try comparing resumes. "Uhhhh...what are the qualifications for this job?"

"A whole lotta hate."

Several voices began snickering in unison. Some trailed off into coughing. I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to start the interview as anyone's bitch.

We waited.

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Seriously. We waited. No one got called, no one moved, no one said anything. We just waited.

It was horrible. Picking the cleanest spot didn't mean it was very comfortable. I was pressed against the greasy, sooty back of the wall, window overhead so I could see anyone coming at me. The house smelled of charred wood and mildew and piss and the ancient residue of crack smoke. It made me feel ill and sleepy. I didn't know how long I could take it, which is funny because I didn't have a choice. None whatsoever.

Then she showed up.

She stepped out of the dark recesses of the house and stood framed in a doorway, moonlight catching her features. She was tall and stunning, dark skinned and straight hair, with the kind of face the Egyptians would have carved out of stone. She was wearing stripper-short business attire, far too revealing be considered professional.

I couldn't help but stare. She stood, stiff and proud, as if being on planet Earth was beneath her. Her athlete's legs were bare and strong, and her heels gave them shape and definition

Men would have died for her in a different age.

"Mr. Chakraborty?" She pronounced my name correctly. Her voice was cold, disinterested. I stood up as gracefully as I could, gathering my leather-bound binder with my extra resumes and letters of recommendation. She turned on her heels and left the room. I followed.

As I passed the other applicants none of them turned to look at us.

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Five, six...

We walked through the house, it's walls covered with strange grafitti, her heels making a thock-thock sound against the bare wood. I struggled to keep pace, but the house's weird symmatry kept me a little off balance. I felt nauseous. Too many drugs had been smoked here.

"If you don't mind my asking..." I said, trying my best not to get off on the wrong foot, "why do you have the interviews here?"

She stopped briefly, turned around, gave me a funny look. "We value discretion during our recruitment process." She smiled, but it was not very friendly. "Besides, we can tell a lot about our applicants from how they react to the environment."

Oh. Mind games. "Interesting." I say, beaming with positive energy.

Did she just giggle? "It's not much farther. Please mind your step."

We start descending a flight of rickety metal steps into the house's basement. Now there's light, but it's harsh and dark red. The air is stale and too warm. She glows in the light. The area is labyrithian and we take several twists and turns until we come to a rickety card table set up between two cartoonishly-large boilers. It was sweltering in there. We might as well have conducted the interview in a sauna.

There is one chair in the room. She motions for me to sit in it. She leans back, butt propped on the table. Her earlier, colder demeanor is gone. She looks down at me, amused. "So why don't you tell me about yourself, Vijay?"

Her tone of voice is about a thousand miles away from interview-speak. Even flooded with heat and brain out to lunch, I can stick to the script. "Well, I'm a recent graduate from the University of California, where I held a 3.91 GPA. I graduated with top honors in my class and I also completed a six month internship at Genentech in South San Francisco, where I worked with Doctor Philips-Solomon on the HPV vaccine proposal."

"Hmm..." she said, sounding disinterested. She rolled her head slowly back on her neck. Sweat began to bead on her dark, dark skin. What was she? Black? Hispanic? Native American? Indian?

I felt my armpits go slick. Was the room getting hotter. Heat haze made the room shimmer. I pushed on. "While at my internship I went to Washington D.C. with the company to support the Greenway Proposal on Health Care...uh..."

I lost my train of thought when she started rubbing those long fingers on her neck. She unbuttoned her jacket, slid it onto her table. Her sweat stuck her white blouse to her skin. She looked up, smiled. "You were saying?"

Back to script. "The Greenway Proposal on State Health Care Reform" (when interviewing, you capitalize these things) "which was a multi-million dollar proposal that brought in experts from all..."

She was looking down at me, those rose petal lips curled up at the corner. She leaned back deeper onto the table. The edge of her skirt caught the lip of the table and pulled the fabric up. She didn't seem to notice or care that she was exposing herself. She was wearing white panties.

I pulled my eyes away from her. My head was spinning. Goddamn this fucking heat.

"I also have letters of recommendation from Doctor Philips-Solomon and my thesis reviewer, Professor Huntsinger." My fumbling fingers reached into the leather folder. The pages were slick from the heat. "Their contact information is on..."

"Do you want to fuck me?"

I wasn't hearing right. My brain is on the floor in a big, gooey, over-educated puddle. My mouth, dry with heat and lust, croaked "Uh?"

Her voice was dusky, devilish. "Do. You. Want. To."

She let the space hang in the air.

"Fuck?"

Everything drained out of me. Consciousness, good conduct, interview questions, everything. I stood up, dizzy and hallucinating. I was frantically reaching for my tie when she pulled me to her by my jacket. I could smell her skin, rich and sweat-slippery and dirty and unfuckingbelievably desirable. She pressed her lips hard on mine and her tongue slid into me, invaded me. I was gone.

I grabbed her beautiful ass, lifted her up on the table. My sweat-slick fingers fumbled with her blouse, lost control, tore the buttons off. She reached down between my legs, grasped my erection, began rubbing her hands up and down it. I slid my hand between her legs, felt how wet she was, how sliiiick...

She gasped. Her hands moved faster on my cock, the confident hands of a lover stroking the come out of me. I tore her bra down off those beautiful tits of hers, her chocolate areolas rich against the bright red room. She grabbed my hair, pulled me close to her face, breathed the words "Fuck me hard..." through my ear and etched them into my brain. I stepped back, freed my hands, went to work on my belt.

Nothing happened.

The belt loops refused to give up any slack. It was like my buckle was glued sealed.

Panic shot through me. I calmed myself, tried again. Come on. Why isn't this fucking opening? I glanced up at the table. She was looking at me with curiosity in her eyes.

I am a thin guy. I tried to wiggle out of my pants. The held firm. I must have looked like an idiot, like an incompetent escape artist with a straight jacket on.

She sat up. She took a deep, theatrically exasperated breath. Her breasts rose and fall, sweat sliding down them.

"Fuck!" I screamed. I couldn't get them off. They seemed to be contracting, hurting me. My erection shrank.

"Typical." She began putting her clothes back into place "You're nothing, Vijay. You couldn't even fuck me!!"

"Shut up..." I hissed.

"You had the opportunity here and you blew it!"

I stopped struggling with my clothes. I turned to her. The red lights from the boiler room were deep in my eyes. What did she say?

"You had one chance, you little faggot..."

I slapped her. It was hard and the shock rolled it's way up to my shoulder. Her head spun away, hair flying in sweat-heavy waves on her head.

We were silent for a moment. I was in the red lights. I've been walking toward a cliff's edge my entire life and I was right at the precipice, looking down into the endless darkness.

She turned her head back to me, slowly, painfully slowly. Her right eye was already swelling, but it didn't seem to bother her. She smiled at me. Jesus, were her teeth always so fucked up?

"Jump..." she said, in the hanged-man's voice.

So I bashed her head into the red-hot boiler.

Jesus, I don't know how it happened. One minute I'm going to fuck her, the next minute that same mindless lust turns into...

I heard her skin sizzle and she howled. I shoved her into it again and again, letting that bitch burn. She fell to the ground, smiling again with angry red welts spreading on her cheek.

I picked up the chair I was sitting on and smacked it down, harder and harder into her until her smile was a fucked up, red smear.

Then I stopped.

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. What the fuck did I just do?

I turned my back. I looked down the endless twists of pipes, deep into the darkness. Was that it? Was that where leaping off the cliff led to? I started crying.

I wish I could say I was crying because of remorse. That would mean that I had a soul, that I could be saved, that just because I fell off the cliff didn't mean that I couldn't climb back out. But it wasn't. I was thinking of the years, the endless nights of studying, the stress, the disapproving looks from my family, the time I wasted in Washington on that stupid trip, my entire wasted college experience and everything I ever achieved. All gone. I was lost.

As I kept falling into myself, the body behind me got to it's feet. The thing that approached me did not look the same at all.

A gloved hand rested on my shoulder. In the corner of my eye, I could see four long knives stick out beside my ear. A deep voice, the horrible voice from the phone, whispered in my ear.

This is all I heard him say.

"You'll do."

Seven, eight...

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He was young and impossibly beautiful.

His skin was clear, his stutter was gone, the weight melted off him like candle wax on a lover's bed. He was dressed in white.

He walked in between them all and they adored him. They wanted to be with him. They wanted to be him.

"We're sorry!" They said in pleading voices. "We know that you're special!"

"We know you have a beautiful soul!" They said and he blushed. It was true, but it was still sweet. "Please forgive us! We will never call you a faggot again!"

This last part was from his family, from his heartless brothers and cold father. The boy cried, deep and honest tears. He was whole. He was home.

They reached out to him and they touched him. They stroked his hair, kissed his cheek. They grabbed him. They pulled him down.

Among them and above them, Vijay Chakraborty watched. A dark joy spread inside of him. This work was good, just as the boss said before he left for parts unknown. There must always be someone to carry on.

He heard the beautiful boy scream. When all was silent, he took the boy, borne home deep inside himself.

Yes, you only get one chance, Vijay reflected. I didn't blow mine.

Nine, ten, never sleep again.

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